


Nor Am I Out of It

by Canaan



Series: Ka!verse [2]
Category: Doctor Who, Torchwood
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, M/M, Missing Scene, Multi, Temporary Character Death - Jack Harkness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-23
Updated: 2011-01-23
Packaged: 2017-10-15 00:24:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/155139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canaan/pseuds/Canaan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack travels before the coda of CoE, but doesn't really find what he's looking for.  Sometimes the voyage doesn't end until you go back to the beginning.  Post-CoE fic--spoilers throughout.  Jack/assorted guest stars</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. To See If I Still Feel

**Author's Note:**

> This one begins toward the end of CoE, right before the coda. Dark and depressing. Subsequent chapters get (a lot) worse. Maybe it's not my fault--I'm not the one who broke Jack this time. Beta'd by the very patient aibhinn.
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't own them, but Jack dragged me through this in loving detail.

The pyramids were just as Jack remembered them, six hundred years from now. So was the poverty. He hadn't meant to seek out the poor districts, but the underfed children drew him. They had no idea how close they'd come to a one-way ticket into oblivion. He fed them, one afternoon. Because he could. He wanted to feel something: better, worse, noble, vindicated, guilty . . . something. Anything that might cut past the pain.

He got mugged eventually, which didn't surprise him. He didn't fight back, which did, a bit: He hadn't been sure he could suppress the reflex.

He revivified face-down in the Aswan and almost drowned. His body fought that one. But then, he already knew you couldn't have everything.

***

Prague was staid and stately. He walked streets he didn't see and fell into a few beds. Prague felt like nothing had changed . . . except him.

He took the next plane leaving for anywhere.

***

  
He left New York fast, so Martha'd have no chance to look him up. So fast, in fact, that he didn’t feel the tensions in the States until he ordered a meal in a bar in South Boston with an out-of-place accent. And he'd thought people looked at him funny in Cardiff.

He didn't get mugged on the subway. He did hear about protests in the capitol. The Earth was saved; humans were beyond help.

He got killed in a race riot in Chicago. He got killed for staying out of one in L.A.

The Grand Canyon was a hole in the ground. He stared at it and all that came to mind was a quote: "The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth."

***

  
Jack was in bed with someone whose name he never knew in Mexico City when the building folded under them. He revivified beneath a corpse and picked himself out of the rubble. The quake had been an 8.7.

He helped with the clean-up for the same reasons he used to work in plague hospitals: He had a strong stomach and it wasn't like his efforts would kill him. He got tired of pulling dead children out of the wreckage, but he supposed it was his due.

They all wore Stephen's face.


	2. The Only Thing That's Real

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by aibhinn.
> 
> WARNINGS: Ouch. It's not actually dub!con. It's not explicit violence and it's not torture. It's also _really_ not BDSM. It's just . . . f*$#ed up. Writing this bit was actively painful.
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't own them, but Jack dragged me through this in loving detail.

Jack was in Melbourne, watching the tide go out, when a voice behind him said, "You are the only person on this beach not having any fun."

He almost didn't turn around, but he didn't trust that voice. _Can't imagine why,_ he thought. He looked off to his right as a familiar form paced up to join him, and tried to feel something for the man standing there. "John," he suggested.

"Still," the other man agreed. "Weather not to your taste? Too hot for that fetching coat, but I must say, the rearward view is better this way." Jack shrugged. "Did you know," John asked, "they have some very pleasant clubs here? Nothing like, oh, some of the places in Hidrolz in the 34th century, but bordering on outré for this time period." Jack shrugged. "Of course, they don't open till later in the evening. But in the meantime, we could be having a much better time together than you're having here on your own."

Jack shrugged.

***

  
John was staying in a bungalow which appeared appallingly pedestrian from the outside. As places he'd once have thought to find John went, Jack had seen stranger--but not many. The inside of the dwelling, though, was furnished in Early John. Far readier for debauchery and mayhem than the outside suggested, it was much more what Jack had expected.

Jack found himself half-stripped without protest, John's hands and mouth all over him, roughly. His body reacted, but there was no passion to it. John shoved him up against a wall hard enough to crack his head. The pain cut through the numb, grey haze of Jack's world, but not enough to do more than make him catch his breath. He hung limp in John's grasp.

John stared at him, eyes intense, from inches away. "Come on, lover--you're always good for more excitement than this. Are you really in there at all?" A quick shift of hips and shoulders telegraphed his intention just before he cracked Jack's skull against the wall again and failed to draw any reaction but that pained breath and the twitch of Jack's cock against his hip. "I was hoping for a little struggle to get my blood moving. Maybe a scuffle to see who's on top. Where have you gone?"

 _"Why, this is Hell,"_ Jack thought, _"nor am I out of it."_

John touched his cheek in what was almost a caress. Fingers slid down Jack's throat, but the feeling of vulnerability that went with the touch didn't draw its usual reaction from him. John's hand smoothed out over his shoulder and continued down his arm until it found the nerve point at the elbow. The pain was intense and far beyond enjoyable, but Jack felt it. He really _felt_ it. His body struggled a little, but Jack's lips parted under John's assault and he whimpered some combination of pain and arousal. He was half-hard by the time the other man drew very slightly away.

John tilted his head forward to put his lips by Jack's ear. "Let me tell you what's going to happen," John murmured. He paused and sank his teeth into the other man's neck, hard enough to draw blood. Jack gasped and tried to pull away at the same time he was rocking against Jack's hip. John released him and licked at the wound for a moment. "You're going to suck me off. After that, I'm going to give you what you seem to need. And when you're in so much pain you don't know whether to beg me to stop or to let you come, I'm going to fuck you till your teeth rattle and you think your eyes will pop out of your head if you open them."

John pulled back to meet Jack's gaze. Jack wondered, briefly, what looked back at the other man. He nodded.

John's hand fell heavy on his shoulder, and he slid to his knees. He rubbed his cheek along the crotch of John's trousers, feeling a faintly familiar hardness there. The gesture was almost tender, but his body was on auto-pilot. He unfastened and unzipped the man in front of him, drawing John's trousers and pants down to gain access to his cock. Jack lapped at the head and then sucked it into his mouth. The simple sex act was something he could do, and do well. Something he could manage without hurting anyone. He poured all his attention into tracing veins with the tip of his tongue and catching at delicate skin with the edge of his teeth. His focus was intense enough his mind was nearly blank. The world narrowed until there was nothing but loss and pain and the cock he'd filled his mouth with, and it was an improvement.

Jack felt fingers in his hair, dragging his head forward. He left his hands dangling limply at his sides, letting the muscles of his throat go lax as John forced his way into it. He couldn't breathe, but he wasn't exactly worried about suffocating. He swallowed around John's cock, accepting it as it fucked his throat and breathing in the odd moments when he was able.

John held onto Jack's head when he came. The world started to go hazy, and Jack wondered, vaguely, if the borderline sociopath had decided he wanted to feel his old partner die around his cock. But then air came back and, unsupported, Jack slumped to the floor. He lay where he fell for a bit. Eventually, he got to his knees and then his feet, wiping his mouth and looking around for John.

The room Jack found him in might have been in use as a bedroom, but it looked more like an advertisement for 21st-century kink. Jack raised an eyebrow. Sheer habit made him open his mouth. "Entertain much?" he asked.

John didn't even look up from the crate he was sifting through. "Now and again. Strip." Jack did so, one or two lifetimes of military habit making him fold trousers and pants neatly and set them aside with his boots. "Engagingly primitive time," John mused, "even without the novelty factor of exploring the motherworld." He was laying items out on the bed for use. Jack listened without really looking at them. "So many more sophisticated ways to play, and yet, we'll keep coming back to some of these for millennia."

"They say the old ways are the good ways," Jack said, blandly.

John gave him a very dry look. "Step in front of that and face it," he directed, pointing at a large piece of furniture near the back wall. It was shaped like an X, made of heavy wood, and its purpose was obvious. Jack stood in front of it and spread his feet apart. He waited to feel something as John secured his ankles to the bottom legs of the X and his wrists to the top: anxiety, relief . . . maybe both.

He didn't. Not until John stood behind him, near enough for Jack to feel body heat, and breathed words against his neck. "This is not about sex," he said. "This is about pain. It stops when I think you've had enough."

Even then, all Jack felt was "ready." "Yeah," he said.

John stepped back. Jack heard him cross to the bed, pause for a moment, and return, stopping a short distance away. "I'm doing this because I love you," John said.

The bald protestation might even be true, from a certain half-mad point of view. Jack laughed, sourly. Aimed at him, those words ought to be the kiss of death . . . but if he destroyed John, the Earth would at least be a slightly safer place.

The first stroke wrapped sharp red pain across his back and around onto his ribs. Jack gasped with it, letting it filter into the hollow, pain-filled cavity in his chest. He let his head hang forward, and the lash continued to fall.

***

  
Jack dressed in the darkness, hearing John's snore without really registering it. John had troubled himself to check for ships coming through the solar system in the next couple days, and even to negotiate a pick-up. His wrist-strap reported Jack's still functioning in Cardiff. Jack had just enough time to get back to Wales and see if he could lay hands on it.

There had been a few blissful moments, earlier, when the physical pain drowned out the other kind. The empty, white space inside his head was glorious. It wasn't penance and it wasn't pleasure, but it helped.

Things were clearer, now. He wasn't doing anyone any good here--especially himself. He wasn't the Doctor; he couldn't fix things. All he did was watch them go to dust, and he just couldn't do it anymore.

The Doctor had moved on. Rose was twice-gone, once almost out of memory and once a stranger he'd seen briefly on the TARDIS: a young woman who didn't feel for him anymore. He'd put a long list of lovers, friends, and family into the soil of this planet. He refused to walk on it anymore. The only one he was really leaving was Gwen. He touched his fingertips to his lips and felt the echo of an emotion before he shrugged into his shirt and worked the buttons. Gwen and her family were safer with him far, far away. Alice was right, and always had been: He was dangerous.


	3. It's All Too Clear

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BR by aibhinn. Disclaimer: I don't own them, but Jack dragged me through this in loving detail.

It was all well and good to want a new life, but mostly, he had to build it out of the old one. Jack had been a soldier, a Time Agent, and a con man. He'd been a mechanic, an explorer, a Torchwood agent, and a defender. He wasn't very good at being a tourist.

He didn't object to being a soldier, but when he thought about it, he realized he'd gotten choosy about his causes. He was no good at taking orders from idiots and politicians, and--based on past performance-- _his_ orders were all too likely to get people under his command killed. _At least they'd have signed up for it_ , a voice in the back of his head whispered. He quashed it ruthlessly.

Time Agent. He didn't even remember what that meant anymore. As a young man, it had sounded exciting and purposeful and a little dangerous. Hard work, maybe, but also something he could excel at. He wasn't sure when it had begun to mean "scoundrel." Maybe when John showed up in Cardiff, and he'd realized he didn't want his team to understand what kind of man he used to be.

Charm seemed pointless right now, and he wasn't sure he could manage it, anyway. Oh, he could trade on his looks, and did, a little: It helped get him to a port that saw enough time-traffic to be worth his while. But charm? It was hard to simulate emotions when you didn't feel anything but pain.

He could explore, more safely than some, as long as no one was depending on him. Some of his technical skills were rusty--he'd spent the last hundred fifty years without anything but what drifted through the Cardiff rift for practice--but fixing the teleport and vortex manipulator functions of his wrist strap wasn't impossible. Not in a sensible century. Not with the right tools and a talented pair of hands.

Exploring the places he hadn't been before was interesting, in a vague sort of way. See the universe. Meet strange new sapients and shag them. Just don't get involved, don't make choices for them, don't care about them, and above all, don't let them depend on you. It was a good plan. But Jack had been a defender for a long time. It was one thing to _say_ he wasn't going to get involved and another to follow through. His resolve held until the first time there were children on the line, and then he couldn't just walk away.

It started as a reflex: playing the protector. It became an addiction--like if he could just save enough young lives, somehow it would bring Stephen back. He was old enough to know better, but that didn't stop him. There started to be stories. He didn't realize it until he visited San Miguel de las Estrellas for the third time, some centuries on, and was mistaken for their patron saint of children--who apparently had fair skin, dark hair, and blue eyes.

It was . . . strange. It made him uncomfortable, which was closer than he'd gotten to really feeling anything in quite a while. On the one hand, it felt too much like people depending on him. On the other, he thought Gwen would be proud of him, and maybe the Doctor, too. He knew Ianto would.

He couldn't remember Ianto's face, quite. The despair of that betrayal faded into the general background pain. There were pictures. He could go back and get one, some day. Gwen would have had some photos of her friends in her home, he was sure of it. She was that kind of person.

On Fedula Minor, the lie came crashing down around his ears. He was in one of the last humanitarian shuttles up, along with a pilot, two priestesses, and sixty-odd orphans. The Quentino bounty hunters targeted him while they were still in atmosphere. Jack was in the middle of telling them he'd teleport onto their ship, _just don't fire!_ when they did.

They were high enough up there was plenty of time for screaming and falling and trying to make an emergency landing in a vehicle about as aerodynamic as a brick.

He revivified in twisted wreckage he couldn't even extract himself from. The pain was hideous, but not nearly as bad as the sad little remains scattered and pinned all around him. Eventually, he got his left arm worked around where he could hit the emergency teleport, just because he couldn't bear to look at them.

He was still dangerous. As long as he kept drawing attention, he'd keep drawing fire. He needed to disappear. Since he couldn't die, he could at least take himself somewhere no one would look, somewhere no one would get attached to him. Somewhere he could suffer for his sins.


	4. Something That Matters

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Final part. An epilogue or a follow-up may occur to me, but this is where "Nor Am I Out of It" wanted to end. BR by the most excellent aibhinn. Disclaimer: I don't own them, but Jack dragged me through this in loving detail.

Zellus was the largest trade city on New Avereon. During the sixty-seventh century, anything that could be had in this sector could be had in Zellus.

Jack sagged in the wrist restraints as he heard the door shut. He floated on a cushion of pain in a sea of darkness. He wanted to straighten his folded legs, but it would have to wait until someone came in to untie him. It probably wouldn't be too long--sooner if he had another appointment right after, because Janell would want to run him through the dermal/subdermal regenerator, first. He didn't mind the waiting, mostly. It was fairly peaceful.

There was a signal tone before the door opened, which meant it was a client. Usually, clients wanted a blank slate, but now and again you had one who wanted to start with what another client had left behind. It worked better when they picked someone who didn't heal so unusually fast, but really, it was all the same to him. The desk crew had his profile: As long as the client's desires matched up with the few needs he had on file, he was up for anything.

Two sets of footfalls approached and stopped just a couple paces back. "Oh, Jack," he heard.

Jack stiffened. That name was the only one he cared to own, and he didn't use it here. The numb haze drifted away a bit, and he wished he weren't blindfolded. "I can be Jack if you want me to be," he said.

There were a few more steps, splitting up and going to both sides of him. A hand stroked through his hair. The caress was haunting for some ill-defined reason. Jack shuddered--this was nothing specifically outside his profile, but something about it grated on what he was passing off as sensibilities these days. A finger tugged at the blindfold. "I'm going to take this off," he heard.

Jack shut his eyes. The room lightened, matching the fading pain of his body. "Jack," the client said, "look at me."

He blinked his eyes open and turned his head, since that was what was required of him. His sense of foreboding sharpened. The face looked familiar, and he tried to place it out of habit, but something wouldn't quite come. "I used to know someone," he said. "She looked like you. But you don't have her eyes."

"Oh, Jack," she breathed again. There was no pain on her voice, only sorrow. She ran a hand down his back, which wasn't even bleeding anymore. The touch was so minor, it faded into the general background pain. "Does it help?" she asked.

"If it's bad enough. For a little while." A heavier hand, large and cool, settled on his shoulder. He shuddered, his fascination with her face thrown into sharp relief, and wondered if he'd finally lost his mind. He might be a fixed point in time and space, but no one ever said he'd stay sane through it. "Either you're really you," he concluded, "or I've got a truly spectacular infection and this is all a fever dream."

She brushed a strayed lock of light brown hair behind her ear. The color suited her. A nagging voice in the back of his head wondered, _If it's a fever dream, why would she have stopped dyeing her hair?_ But if it were anything else . . . how would she be here, and why? "If we take these off," she said, tapping a wrist restraint, "will you run away?"

"Not till I've got some bloodflow to my feet," he said.

The Doctor's hands weren't like the ones he knew, he thought as they reached for his wrists. They were broad in a raw-boned kind of way, and must dwarf his sonic screwdriver quite ridiculously. Right now, they unbuckled the old-fashioned cuffs from his wrists and let them hang from their attachment point on the wall. Jack rubbed his wrists for a moment, then turned to sit on the floor and stretched his legs out in front of him. The pain of restored circulation was welcome. He looked up, way up, at a man even taller than the ones he remembered, with a breadth of shoulder to match his hands. He wore a plain shirt with laces at the throat and blousing sleeves that gathered into tight cuffs. His trousers were tight enough Jack couldn't help giving them a second glance.

The Doctor's hair was ginger, just salted through with the first scattering of grey. His eyes were brown and fathomless. "You've regenerated again," Jack said, dumbly.

The Doctor looked down at him while Rose sank to her knees on his other side. "Four, five times since you last saw me," the Time Lord agreed. "Doesn't seem to be an end to it--guess the universe is stuck with me, too."

Jack's eyes narrowed. "If you know when I last saw you, you know what I've done. So why are you here?" he asked.

"We're here for _you_ , Jack," Rose said.

The gentle note in her voice made him shudder. It was so much easier to stay numb, and she was trying to cut through that. He turned toward her and glared. "You shouldn't be. I keep killing everyone who cares for me. I've committed the kind of betrayals you can't ever make up for." His voice hitched, and he almost felt strongly enough to hate the weakness. "I murdered my grandson."

Her hand was soft where she reached out to cradle his cheek. Looking into her eyes was like looking into a mirror, only he'd never seen this kind of compassion in a mirror. "I know," she said.

His throat felt tight in a way it hadn't in years . . . or decades, maybe? He'd lost count. "Why now?" he asked.

"It was time," the Doctor said. Jack turned again, and the Doctor crouched down to meet his eyes. That terrible compassion was there, too. But then, it always had been.

He looked back at Rose. _How old are you?_ he wondered. _Have you buried them all, yet?_

Her eyes were still deep and a little sad, but he recognized that smile. It made his heart start to swell, and a horrified rage began to eat at the omnipresent pain. How dare they come here, the two of them, and make him feel things again? "Right, then," she said. "You done feelin' sorry for yourself?"

His breath caught in his throat. It was the first time he'd thought about it that way. That drowning the pain with more pain was self-indulgent. That suffering was something he did for himself: not for Stephen, not for Alice, certainly not for all the people who'd counted on him. He didn't understand; he'd never _meant_ it to be selfish. "It's not about that," he protested. His voice sounded thready and panicked in his own ears.

"Course it is," the Doctor said, mildly. "I crossed my own timeline, once, to rescue an ex-Time Agent from a German bomb, just so I'd have a day where everybody really did live. We all do stupid, selfish things, Jack. Some of 'em are beautiful." He pulled a face. "Some of 'em less so; there's a shower back on the TARDIS with your name on it."

Jack took sudden stock of his condition. The welts were fading and the bruises didn't matter, but he was covered in blood and sweat and cum and he didn't know how they could stand to look at him. He shook his head and tried not to feel like the ground was crumbling beneath his feet--or his arse, as the case might be. He drew his knees up and wrapped his arms around them. "You shouldn't take me with you," he said. "I'm dangerous."

"So'm I," the Doctor pointed out.

Rose leaned her face against his shoulder. "If you want to put it like that," she said, "I am, too. I did this to us. There's few things in the universe as dangerous as youth and love."

Jack didn't move--he wasn't sure if he was afraid to feel more of her touch or afraid she'd pull away. "I'm not in enough in love with my own life," he told them. "I used to think that about you, Doc, in some of your earlier regenerations. It makes me dangerous to the people around me." He swallowed. "I'm not used to caring about the people around me."

The Doctor gave him a sardonic smile, close cousin to a manic grin he still remembered through the decades. "What's it goin' to do? Kill us?"

A helpless laugh tugged at the back of Jack's throat. It was alien there: an intruder. He swallowed it down, ruthlessly. "There will be bad days," he found himself muttering. "There'll be days when I need . . . " He gestured vaguely around him, implying pain and feeling only self-disgust.

The Doctor rested a hand on his shoulder again. Rose wrapped an arm around his waist and drew him close to her. "We'll deal with it, Jack. One way or another. We're all old. You can't shock us."

He actually started to consider it. Back to the TARDIS. Back to trying. Back . . . to having to accept trust and make choices. He'd thought himself beyond emotion for so long, but fear began to well in the pit of his stomach. "What if I screw up?" he said. "I don't know how to face that, anymore."

"Look at me," Rose said, again. He did. She smiled a little. "Tell me about your grandson, Jack."

Jack swallowed, and thought about Stephen. Not about the murder. Not about what he'd lost, or the hate in Alice's eyes. About blond hair and blue eyes and chubby little hands playing with toy spaceships. The little voice that asked why he didn't come visit more. The way Alice frowned when they played soldiers in her back garden. All that joy, all that potential, and maybe that was just like any other kid, but this time was different, because this one was his grandson . . .

Deep in his chest, Jack felt something give. The tears he hadn't cried since Stephen's death began to run down his face, but he found they were no worse than the other things he was covered in. "His name," he told her quietly, "was Stephen Carter."

Finally, Jack began to grieve.


End file.
